Getting power to the tower

Last Tuesday, I finished up some work and then headed toward my 2006 Chevrolet Cobalt SS so that I could visit my girlfriend Nicole. As I got in my car, I noticed that the street lights and house lights in my neighborhood began to simultaneously flicker. Then they all went out. Five seconds later, the power was restored and all was well.

I thought nothing of it – probably a massive power surge that could have been worse, had it not been for the diligent efforts of the Green Island Power Authority.

When I got home later that night, I did what most people do after a blackout – reset all the clocks, and double-check my connection to Time Warner Cable (sometimes the converter box starts acting flaky after a blackout and must be reset).

Aw, crumbs. The power surge clobbered something in my desktop computer. And the thing was, I did have the computer plugged into one of those power surge protectors / uninterrupted power supply units, but apparently the surge must have been too powerful for even that unit to handle.

Assess the damage. I can still write my blog posts on my laptop computer, which I bought two years ago after my old Sony VAIO finally keeled over. And I could still do my NBL Canada stat work with the laptop, so there won’t be any interruption of service or duties on that front.

But the desktop had, among other things, my photography archive, my graphics software, and about 4,000 iTunes files.

Okay. And at that point in time, I had three options.

I could either:

Wait until morning, drive out to Best Buy and purchase a brand new desktop computer unit, re-register all my software, and hope that I can transfer all those iTunes purchases.

Drive over to the Times Union and commandeer Mark McGuire’s old computer system and write my blog post from there. I mean, he just retired, it’s not like he’s using that system any more…

And in the end, I chose Option D.

And Option D was to investigate why the computer tower isn’t working, before making any decisions otherwise.

My computer tower is one of those “build it yourself” chassis units, where everything from the memory to the motherboard, from the hard drives to the optical drives, were all assembled into one large black chassis. And when I built the unit, way back in I think 2007, I put in as much state-of-the-art stuff as I could purchase.

The chassis also had a nice feature where you could see inside the unit and the interior of the chassis was bathed in blue LED light. Okay, at one point in time I was thinking about things like water-cooling and case modding, but that was so long ago…

But a cursory investigation revealed that the interior lights were out. That meant that the computer’s power supply was disabled, as it must have taken the biggest hit from the power surge.

I had my computer tech Mike swap out the old system for a new power supply, a 550-watt power-beast he ordered on Newegg.com. After the unit arrived, he installed it, tested it out, and gave me the news.

“Yep, it was the power supply. This new one works fine. All is well.”

That’s good. I was worried that the surge might have taken out both the power supply AND the motherboard, and God knows what else.

On Thursday night, I brought the tower home, plugged in all the connectors and the ports, and started the unit up.

The blue lights inside the tower gleamed with their chilly glow.

The Windows logo popped up on my computer screen.

Yep. All is well. The tower survives yet again.

In fact, I just wrote this Saturday morning blog post on my computer tower, with its new power supply transplant.

I guess in situations like these, I just can’t automatically assume that the worst is going to happen. I have to take in the possibility that yeah, maybe something will happen, but it could be something simple and easy to repair.

In other words, if I hear hoofbeats in the distance, I have to consider the first possibility of a stampede of horses – and not a stampede of zebras.